This year is a make-or-break election for our state’s economic future.
A good public school system is essential to recruit and retain the workforce and have a growing economy. As business owners, we are beyond frustrated that the Legislature fell a single vote short of overriding the governor’s veto of education funding. As a result, in mid-October, the Anchorage School District is releasing a list of schools proposed for closure. The inability to provide stable funding for schools is the primary driver of economic malaise and outmigration in Alaska.
CNBC recently released its rankings of the best states in the U.S. for business. Alaska was ranked 48th. The top state was Virginia, and the No. 1 reason it was ranked highly was support for public schools and small class sizes. According to CNBC, Virginia averages 18 kids per classroom, a reasonable number that allows high-quality and individualized instruction. Compare those very reasonable class sizes to the massive class sizes in Anchorage and all other urban districts.
Under our Alaska Constitution, the Legislature has a duty to fund a public school system that is accessible to all students. For most of the last decade, the Legislature allowed school funding to fall every year. This year, the Senate’s bipartisan majority caucus finally prioritized school funding and, bridging party divides, advanced legislation to restore half the funding that’d been cut over the previous decade.
We applaud those legislators who went right back to work and restored $175 million in the budget. However, one-time funding leaves our schools in the untenable position of having no idea how much funding they will have from year to year. As a result, the Anchorage School District is forced to consider the closure of beloved neighborhood schools.
As business leaders, we urge you to vote for pro-education legislators who will fund our schools and vote to override Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s vetoes if necessary. It is past time to restore stability to our education system and get Alaska back on track with economic growth.The views expressed here are the writer’s and are not necessarily endorsed by the Anchorage Daily News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints.
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